15 Ways To Commit Career Suicide Onscreen via [#popcrunch, #epicfail, #movieflops, #boxofficepoision]
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15 Career-Ending Movies
The celebrity life is certainly enviable. People will literally give you tens of thousands of dollars for performing the most basic of human functions — namely inhaling, exhaling, and taking up some space. While it seems nice to simply to exist and occasionally be either beautiful or funny, fame can be fickle. Even the best and most famous actors can be laid low by one or two bad movies. So let’s delight in a little Schadenfreude as millionaires that got laid way more than we ever will tumble from their lofty heights because of poor artistic decisions.
Gigli
Career Ruined: Ben Affleck
Gigli has become almost synonymous with the phrase “catastrophic failure”. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez star in this epic flop about lesbians, gangsters and other things that, if you can quote off hand, probably mean you need to reevaluate your life. Gigli struck at what was arguably the height of Lopez and Affleck’s fame. On top of that, the two had been tabloid sweethearts for months leading up to the release of the movie. There’s nothing Americans likes to see more than a good, hard fall and they both took it nose-first.
Lopez eventually recovered and recently began making the same soulless rom-coms that initially propelled her to fame. Affleck was not just black listed from anything resembling a decent movie, but he retroactively lost credit for Good Will Hunting as a result of Matt Damon’s career taking off shortly thereafter and everyone suddenly assuming Damon was the real brains behind the Oscar winner. Lately, Affleck has been staging something of a slow covert comeback mostly from the directors chair with pretty decent flicks like Gone Baby Gone and The Town.
Alone in the Dark
Career Ruined: Tara Reid
To be fair, by the time she starred in Alone in the Dark, Tara Reid had become known as such a sleazy Jersey girl that she even ended up playing a parody of herself in Scrubs. Alone in the Dark was just so god awfully terrible that people were forced to reevaluate their already-low expectations for Reid. While many other good actors have survived an inexplicable role in an Uwe Boll movie, Reid barely had a misshapen, badly liposuctioned leg to stand on at this point.
Honorable Mention here goes to Christian Slater, but if you think his career had anything resembling “life” in it at that point, you like True Romance waaaay too much.
Catwoman & Basic Instinct 2
Career Ruined: Sharon Stone
As sadistic as Americans are, we are also pathological optimists. An actor will always get precisely one shot at redemption every decade. So after the reality-warping awfulness of Catwoman which featured Halle Berry lazily beating up baddies while quite seriously uttering lines like “What a purrrrrrrfect idea”, audiences were willing to give both her and villain Sharon Stone another chance.
Halle Berry responded with Gothika and “Remember guys, I was in Monster’s Ball.” Sharon Stone responded with Basic Instinct 2: a film that tried to recapture the original’s danger and raw sexuality. While it succeeded somewhat, Basic Instinct 2 suffered from a terminal case of “bitch be old now” syndrome. What was edgy in the early 90s makes audiences raised on internet porn yawn with boredom. And though Sharon Stone is impressively hot for pushing 50, the raw, energetic sexuality had given way to something that was just sinister and boring.
Star Wars: Episode One
Career Ruined: Jake Lloyd
So just about everything that could be said about how awful Episode One is has already been said. But what is often forgotten is that the kid upon whom the greatest disappointment in history was heaped had to grow up, live through a painful puberty, and become yet another child actor who’s too ugly to be in movies.
Actually that’s a common, but unfair, critique. There are plenty of ugly, successful actors in Hollywood. The problem is that Lloyd will never be able to not be the kid who crushed more nerd dreams than Daikatana and 3D Realms combined.
The Last Airbender
Career Ruined: M. Night Shyamalan (hopefully)
By now it’s well known that M. Night Shyamalan is a hack with a very compelling gimmick. Having not made a movie that could be considered “halfway decent” since Unbreakable, his inevitable decline has been tempered by the fact that his movies inexplicably keep making money.
That all changed with The Last Airbender, Shyamalan’s first movie to absolutely tank. Audiences are slowly beginning to wise to the fact that Shyamalan’s slick director and (by now) yawn-inducing “twists” are no substitute for a story that is not cobbled together from things pulled out of Shyamalan’s ass. There will most likely be more Shyamalan movies before he’s done, and he is of course entitled to his obligatory comeback chance every decade. But Shyamalan had the dubious luck of producing his best work first, which means for the rest of his career he will be considered a talentless hack rather than an undiscovered genius.
The Love Guru
Career Ruined: Mike Myers
Another career that isn’t quite over yet, it’s worth mentioning that Mike Myers isn’t a particularly prolific movie actor anyway. He has basically succeeded with three franchises–Wayne’s World, Austin Powers and Shrek–all of which are so outrageously topical that they’re impossible to revive. The Love Guru, which we can only imagine was an attempt to launch another trilogy, was so bald-facedly bad, racist, and bad, that it succeeded in revealing what critics had been saying for the better part of a decade: at his core routine, Mike Myers isn’t actually that funny.
Not to say of course that Austin Powers wasn’t funny or that Shrek didn’t have its moments, but that when you take Austin Powers out of a world with Dr. Evil, mutant sea bass, and a genre rife for the pillorying, he’s not that funny a character on his own. And that’s what Love Guru tried to do–make a movie just about Austin Powers’ sex drive.
Bio-Dome
Career Ruined: Pauly Shore
Let’s not kid ourselves, Pauly was on the way out long before Bio-Dome hit theaters, this movie was simply the final nail in the coffin. Pauly shore was one of those “totally wacky” stand up comedians everyone saw a few minutes of late night on some cable channel. This landed him a TV show where it became frighteningly clear that while Pauly Shore’s shtick was fine for a 20 minute stand up routine, it became woefully inadequate when stretched to even a 22 minute show length.
It took audiences a while to realize this, since he only played a supporting role Encino Man, a movie where his gimmicks can barely even fill up the trailer. But after watching the painful Son in Law and In the Army Now, by the time Bio-Dome came around audiences took one look at a bill that said “Starring Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin” and decided they could pass.
Battlefield Earth
Career Ruined: John Travolta
John Travolta really just cannot win. After becoming a sex symbol in the 70s only to slowly diminish during the 80s, he was handed the come back role of come back roles as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction. Suddenly Travolta was cool, edgy, and dangerous all over again. The he made Get Shorty and his status as the slick and cool asshole was cemented. Suddenly he had a new identity–uniquely 90s, conveniently divorced from disco.
And then he had to go become a Scientologist and make Battlefield Earth. Otherwise known as the worst movie in recent memory, also known as the movie that people hilariously disown.
There was a moment where it seemed like Halle Berry’s tits might revive his career but then he made The Punisher, Wild Hogs, Hairspray, Old Dogs, and From Paris With Love.
Honorable mention here goes to Barry Pepper who will never have a leading role again, but has had some strong supporting roles since.
The Day After Tomorrow & The Alamo
Career Ruined: Dennis Quaid
Most people who saw The Day After Tomorrow responded with either bewilderment or stifled giggles at the thought of centuries-long climate change suddenly swamping New York and spawning some sort of mutant wolf. Most people who saw The Alamo didn’t have anything to say because no one saw The Alamo. Both starred Dennis Quaid as a more-likeable-but-less-windswept Kevin Costner.
The Day After Tomorrow was a relative commercial success, but was utterly panned by critics and physicists alike. The Alamo was a tremendous, expensive failure that was widely panned by critics and historians alike. Both combined to kill Quaid’s already fragile career that had seemed exclusively built on playing confused protagonists.
Waterworld & The Postman
Career Ruined: Kevin Costner
Kevin Costner was another one of those actors who was quietly slipped into good movies so no one ever realized he was actually terrible until it was too late and they had already handed him several hundred million dollars to make the abysmal Postman and Waterworld.
Everything terrible about Kevin Coster’s “It Deserved to Die” Career can be summed up in this scene.
In the course of a one minute thirty second clip, Costner:
1. Pauses in the middle of a firefight to deliver a lengthy explanation of breathing mechanics
2. Reveals the terrible hair plugs that forced them to re-shoot several million dollar scenes
3. The immortal “my boat”, delivered with only slight more talent than a limp rag
4. Vagina Gills
Under Siege 2
Career Ruined: Steven Seagal
So it could be argued that maybe Steven Seagal didn’t really have a career to ruin in the first place. But Under Siege, which had big names like Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey headlining as the bad guys, was his first real main-stream hit. To be fair it was a pretty fun romp, and Seagal’s calm, almost snarky demeanor was a perfect contrast to the absolutely mental characters played by Jones and Busey.
Right when America was about ready to accept the doughy buddhist cook as its next favorite action hero, Seagal had to go and make Under Siege 2. You know how the first Under Siege was based on a giant battleship carrying nuclear weapons that were being stolen by crazy terrorist Tommy Lee Jones? So Under Siege 2 was set on a fu&@*ng train carrying boring tourists being harassed by some nerd. Oh and last time his side kick was an appealing set of tits, in the sequel all we got was perhaps one of the lamest sassy black sidekicks ever.
Red Planet
Career Ruined: Val Kilmer
Remember the last movie Val Kilmer was in? Yeah neither does anyone else. Quick name a movie besides Batman that starred Val Kilmer and came out this millennia. Yeah neither can anyone else, but would you believe he’s made dozens? (Okay you get bonus points if you remembered Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). Red Planet was the last gasp attempt to turn Val Kilmer into an action star. It was a big fat expensive failure that pretty much dragged Kilmer’s career down with it.
Quick, name an activity that Kilmer has undertaken in the past decade other than becoming impossibly rotund? (Trick question, there is no answer).
The 6th Sense
Career Ruined: Haley Joel Osment
Much like M. Night Shyamalan himself, Haley Joel Osment had the unfortunate luck of making what will probably be his best movie before age 12. Once you’ve been nominated for an Academy Award at the age that most of us are reaching first base, it makes sense that life will lose some of its perspective. Osment, after starring in a few unremarkable flicks, eventually suffered from the Jake Lloyd too ugly to star syndrome.
Which of course is just a lazy way of saying that when you are the person who utters such an iconic line as “I see dead people”, you cannot be in another movie unless you lose your baby face. Which, judging by his current appearance, will come when Osment hits 63.
Batman & Robin
Career Ruined: Chris O’Donnell
Batman & Robin was a shlocky action film that took the camp of the 1960s Adam West Batman to near apotheosis. In the opening scene alone, Robin (played by Chris O’Donnell) crashes his bike through a wall which leaves a perfect Robin-Symbol-Shaped hole, slides down the back of a frozen brontosaurus, and generally hams it up to an unbearable degree.
Before this movie, O’Donnell was a teen heart throb well on his way to consistent leading man status. Unfortunately, Batman & Robin was so laughably terrible that nearly everyone involved almost watched their career implode. Even director Joel Schumacher later apologized for nearly sinking the Batman franchise. George Clooney, Uma Thurman, and Arnold Schwarzenegger all had strong enough careers to pull themselves out of this trainwreck, but O’Donnell was burnt at the stake–presumably because God demanded a sacrifice for such a god-awful movie.
Star Wars
Career Ruined: Mark Ham-oh wait no Alec Guinness
Everyone likes to talk about how Mark Hamill’s career was ruined by Star Wars. He never really showed up in another movie, and certainly not in a leading role. But the truth is Hamill has really found a hidden place in cinema, becoming the iconic voice of The Joker as well as playing a part in several dozen animated ventures, some of which are incredibly hilarious.
No the real tragedy from Star Wars was Alec Guinness, a highly acclaimed actor who had to live with the fact that most people only watched the Bridge of the River Kwai because he was Obi-Wan in Star Wars. Though he was pushing 60 when he starred in A New Hope, Guinness didn’t have another really successful role after that except for his baffling role as a Brahim in A Passage to India. He died in 2000, publicly bemoaning how dumb Star Wars was, and how he hated it so much it was actually his idea to kill off Obi-Wan.
Tags: #popculture, #boxofficepoison, #movieflops, #Gigli, #Waterworld, #StarWars, #Popular Culture, #film, #epicfail, #rottentomatoes, #theloveguru,
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